Obsolete Your Idols

I finished reading my first book by Eco yestereve,  Foucault’s Pendulum.  This is another one of those books where my co-workers, seeing me read it, had opinions about it.  My boss loves it and the CEO has re-read it several times.  Contrariwise, another co-worker hated it.  This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to read Umberto Eco, but it’s the first time I finished.  Perhaps, like Catch-22, I needed to age into it.  It’s got a lot of things I enjoyed in The Illuminatus! Trilogy and I can see where it would lend itself to increased enjoyment with re-reading.

One frustration I had with it is that parts of it are in languages I don’t read and, in fact, it was originally written in a language I don’t read, giving me the impression that there’s much more going on there in the text than I can understand.  If I re-read it, I’ll have to do it with  different dictionaries, one for Italian, one for French, one for Latin.  Ideally I’d learn Italian and read it in the original but I don’t know if there are enough years left for that.

The story itself is structured as a pair of nested flashbacks and there are other flashbacks embedded inside of it.  The core conceit of the work (the Plan) is that it’s constructed through a randomization of text fragments, strikingly like the reputed method PKD used when writing The Man in the High Castle, so there’s another literary parallel which I found enjoyable.   Ultimately, though, I wasn’t as happy with the shaggy dog story flow where it all boils down to “bad things are going to happen because people are gullible”.

What I liked

• whirlwind tours of occult history
• characterizations of minor characters, thin and sharp as a thumb’s nail
• presentation of alternative explanations for history’s events
• references and call-outs to other works I’ve read

What I didn’t

• sometimes hard to follow conversations in languages I don’t read
• not a real sense of closure at the end of the story

Who might enjoy this book

• occultists, diabolicals, fans of conspiracy for the sake of conspiring
• members of spiritual knighthoods
• late modernist readers who like texts they can deconstruct and still have something left to hold
• polymaths and multilinguists

I kept a blog in blosxom from 2003 until this month.  I’m no longer interested in spending the time to fuss with it and am embracing the lightness of GUI blogging.  I’ve put everything where it used to be for people who might have bookmarked the old blog and otherwise I intend to continue forward with WordPress, at least for a little while.

I do recommend blosxom for someone who loves Perl and has shell access to their webspace.  That’s just no longer me.